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Oracle Accused of Downplaying Database Flaws, Severity

Security experts accused Oracle of not paying attention to its flagship database software and underreporting the severity of a "fundamental" flaw.

Even as Oracle fixed numerous flaws across multiple products in January's Critical Patch Update, security experts criticized the company for the low number of database fixes and claimed the company is downplaying the severity of a flaw in its flagship relational database.

Only two patches were for the Oracle Database out of the 78 security fixes in the January update, which also covered the Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle e-Business Suite, Oracle Supply Chain, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle JDEdwards, Oracle Sun products, Oracle Virtualization and Oracle MySQL, the company said in its CPU advisory released Jan. 17.

"Either the database server has reached an amazing maturity in terms of security or Oracle did not have enough resources to include more fixes into the process," Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, told eWEEK.

As Oracle expands its product portfolio and increases the total number of products patched through the quarterly CPU, there appears to be a "bottleneck" in Oracle's patching process, Shulman said. This CPU was the first time Oracle included the open-source MySQL database, which it acquired in 2010 as part of the Sun Microsystems acquisition.

Further reading

While MySQL accounted for a whopping 27 fixes, the overall number of vulnerabilities in the CPU remained consistent with previous releases, according to Shulman. "If you were to introduce a new product, there should be more vulnerabilities in the CPU," he said.

The low number of Oracle database fixes is most likely a sign of Oracle shifting its focus and "de-emphasizing" the entire database line, Alex Rothacker, director of security research at Application Security's TeamSHATTER, told eWEEK. Oracle has been consistently decreasing the number of database-related fixes in its CPU since January 2010, shortly after the Sun deal closed, he said. The company released only 34 fixes for Oracle Database Server in all of 2011.

Of the nine reported vulnerabilities TeamSHATTER has open with Oracle, several of them are "at least as severe as those that were fixed in this CPU," Rothacker said.

Oracle claimed there were fewer issues to fix in its software. The Oracle Database Server code has "matured," and many of the vulnerabilities have been weeded out, Eric Maurice, director of Oracle's security assurance program, wrote in the Oracle Software Security Assurance blog on Dec. 15.

Oracle has also introduced a secure coding initiative, similar to Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle, which has resulted in fewer bugs in new code, according to Maurice.